Tuesday, March 27, 2012

(Note: I kind of wrote this straight without editing, and I decided to post it as-is. If it meanders, well, you know where that came from.)

I was on Tomakan, working my way through Un’Goro Crater,
when a guildie posed me a question.

“What do you think of the revamped zones?”

“I’m kind of torn,” I replied. “I don’t like the quests-on-rails, but in
some zones the stories are compelling: Stonetalon
on both sides, Southern Barrens on both sides.
They needed to do the quests-on-rails format to tell a story, especially
with the phasing involved. However, for
a sandbox it doesn’t work so well.”

I couldn’t get those comments out of my head while I took a
break and got catapulted into a WSG run.
While I’m not the biggest WSG fan, I still preferred that WSG game to
the prospect of going back to Northrend and finishing up the zones I’d left
behind. Why was that, I asked
myself. Leveling a Warlock via BGs in
Cata is an exercise in masochism, yet that was preferable to finishing up Zul’Drak
for the fourth or fifth time.

The easiest answer to that is because the story never
changes. Even with phasing, we know this
tale because we’ve played it before. The
outcomes are always the same, every time you play. You may have an impact on the game world, but
your choices don’t matter. The few times
you do have a true choice –to either kill or release the harpy leader in Hyjal,
for example—it’s not a game impacting decision.
It’s a lot like the jokes that would get thrown around in the Culling of
Stratholme instance about simply letting Arthas die: everyone knows that the point of the instance
is to keep him alive, in spite of our personal preferences, so we’ll simply
just tag along in the knowledge that this really isn’t our story, but Blizzard’s.

This understanding about the game world is the basis for how
Blizzard gets away with having major plot threads performed off-stage in books,
rather than in the world itself. I’ve
found even in my own writing that it is easier to have certain major events
occur off-stage and then have the characters react to that instead of the more
arduous task of actually putting the events down on paper. I can only imagine that this difficulty is
magnified when you have to have people “act” in an MMO: you’d have to design the quests, the NPC
activity, the words, the artwork, and all sorts of other stuff associated in
setting up a scene vs. paying an author $5k-$10k-$20k to write a book. To a finance department, that’s a no-brainer.

And yet, I can’t help but wonder if a good portion of the
reason why the lower level zones are so consistently empty is because we really
don’t have an impact on the story. Those
zones are reduced to being leveling fodder for people hunting for a transmog
piece of gear or are populated with gold farmers trying to crank out as much
raw materials as they can. Because we can’t
change the story we’re forced to relive the events of the doomed Alliance
commander in Southern Barrens where he is effectively betrayed by elements of
his own side who want a scorched earth policy toward the Horde. We can’t even raise a red flag to the Horde
commander in Ashenvale that there might be a demon hiding in his midst until
such activity draws the ire of Garrosh.
(Old Garrosh despises demons far more than the Alliance, and I have to
give him credit for that.) Have we seen
this play before? You bet we have. And like a cursed sailor on the Flying
Dutchman, we’re forced to relive these events every time we quest in a
particular zone.

Perhaps that’s what appeals to me in BGs: the outcome is uncertain, and you can have an
impact on the game. Sure, you can be
saddled with a lot of people who know nothing about how to play AV, but so can
the other side. Plenty of real battles
were fought when one side was hopelessly green or outnumbered, and yet you can
never say for certain what will happen in the end once the troops are
committed. (The Battle of Marathon or
the Siege of Rhodes in 1480 both come to mind.)

In a game designed like WoW, perhaps this is the best we can
come to an uncertain outcome where our decisions actually matter. Sure, there’s raiding, and I’ve heard and
seen the toll that smashing your collective head against the impregnable wall
of an end boss can put on a person and a guild.
Raiding is, by nature, a hard thing to accomplish, and once you succeed
all of that effort will have been worth it.
However, the story will never change no matter how many times we down
that boss. Once the boss is a photo op lying
on the ground, we know how things will go.
The NPC reactions are always the same.

This might be an unintended side-effect of the LFR
tool: as more people can easily see end
content, the clamor for the new shiny comes louder and quicker. While some folks love to chase hard modes (or
even normal modes now) others who are conditioned by console gaming say “Okay,
I’ve beaten the game. Now what?” This isn’t because people are greedy, it’s
just that they’re conditioned to play the game a certain way, and if that goal
is reached more quickly, they’re at a loss as to what to do.

***

MMOs –even those that aren’t sandbox types-- are by nature
big worlds with lots of options. Soul
and I have posted that very thing on occasion when the “I’m bored!” crowd kicks
it into high gear. If you’re bored with
5-mans, try BGs. If you are looking for
something off the beaten track, try a naked dungeon challenge like what Rades advocated. Or maybe how about an
old-time flashback and organize a Paladin vs. Shaman throwdown?

However, it needs to be said that people have different
motivations when playing an MMO such as WoW, and when that motivation is
unfilled, people will move on in search of that magic. But what is that magic that people are
chasing?

Everyone is different.
People play games for different reasons.
Some love a good story; some love the thrill of having beaten the game;
some go for the competition of PvP; some love to collect, and some just live to
role play. There are as many different
motivations to playing an MMO as there are options inside a game. That elusive magic that a game can bring into
your soul is a chameleon; each player sees a different siren leading them
onward.

Perhaps the restlessness we see in the MMO world today is a
reflection of chameleon like nature of our pursuit of the magic. People remember that moment, that ‘oh wow’
moment, and they wish to recapture it.
For some, the new shiny holds promise, and we shouldn’t be surprised
when people unsub/resub in pursuit of that new shiny. This same group will migrate to and from
MMOs, testing the latest and greatest, yet remembering their first.

I still play ‘old’ games such as Civ and Master of Orion,
because the magic is still there. I
remember that thrill when I finally beat Civ I on King level, a feat I’ve never
repeated. My kids will see the clunky
graphics and primitive sounds of MOO and laugh, but I know that they’ll
remember Civ IV the same way I remember Civ I.
Or how I remember when I finally started playing WoW.